How can one effectively troubleshoot and debug issues related to input fields and character encoding in PHP?

When troubleshooting input field and character encoding issues in PHP, it is important to ensure that the form's accept-charset attribute is set to UTF-8 and that the PHP script handling the form data also uses UTF-8 encoding. Additionally, using functions like htmlspecialchars() and htmlentities() can help sanitize input and prevent encoding issues. 

<form action="process_form.php" method="post" accept-charset="UTF-8">
    <input type="text" name="name">
    <input type="submit" value="Submit">
</form>
```

```php
<?php
// process_form.php

// Set encoding to UTF-8
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');

// Sanitize input data
$name = htmlspecialchars($_POST['name']);

// Use the sanitized input data
echo "Hello, " . $name;
?>

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